Getting to the Core of Nostalgia: Reflections on Apple Season in Western Pennsylvania
Enjoy this blog and recipe written by CRAFT Graduate Assistant, Calla-Marie NormanThroughout much of the year, I don’t particularly care for apples. While shopping in the produce section at the grocery store, I usually bypass the shiny Honeycrisps, uniform and dull Red Deliciouses, and colorful Pink Ladies in favor of other fruits. It didn’t used to be like this - apples were one of my childhood go-to snacks, and I have fond memories of my parents pairing slices of Golden Delicious with cheddar cheese for me and my brother. Today, my fruit basket at home is usually filled throughout the year with tropical fruits such as oranges, bananas, and mangoes instead of apples, which always seem so omnipresent and unassuming. However, my whole attitude changes in October.
Once the air starts to get crisp and as soon as the leaves begin to fall, I can’t get enough apples! Some innate craving for autumnal flavors kicks in, and as soon as I get to the farmer’s market, I instantly gravitate toward the bushels of apples filling many of the stalls. I’ll go for apple cider, apple pastries, dumplings, apples cooked into stews and topping salads, nothing is safe - nothing! Merely walking into the grocery store for the first time during the fall season, where I’m greeted by massive displays of commercial ciders, caramel apples, and apple and pumpkin-flavored everything, always gives me a distinct thrill.
It’s also around this time that my friends repeatedly say, “We should go apple picking!” and social media is saturated with happy acquaintances out with family and friends holding abundant bushels of hand-picked apples. With precautionary measures such as masks, sanitizing, and social distancing, heading out an apple orchard or a farmer’s market for your apple fix might be one of the safer options of getting out of a pandemic rut (no bobbing for apples, this year, though why anyone would want to do that even with no pandemic is beyond me). Anyway, to me, apples are symbolic of this season of warmth, abundance, and well-being, and in this year’s autumn especially, stocking up on apples and cooking with them feels like a much-needed means of accessing some good old-fashioned nostalgia.
That being said, apples in western Pennsylvania have a deep history, and not all of it has been warm-hearted. The average consumer might not recognize the varieties that were once widely grown here starting from the colonial era, as they were mostly bitter, seedy apples meant for pressing into cider, which was a staple beverage for colonists of all ages. These trees were destroyed in response to Prohibition, and farmers began using the method of grafting to create sweeter apples for snacking on that we know of today. Apple orchards are also deeply rooted in problematic elements of United States history such as slavery and land-grabbing through Western expansion (Miller).
One of the mythological heroes of apples in America is Johnny Appleseed, whose real name was John Chapman, and he has been celebrated throughout history as a pacifist, environmentalist, and sojourning wanderer. Indeed, I have fond memories of watching a Disney cartoon about young Johnny Appleseed climbing a tree in “Pittsburgh-town”, singing, “The Lord is good to me” and peeling an apple in one smooth motion, giving the peel to cartoon birds and the flesh to cartoon bees. The cartoon characterizes Johnny as an innocent farmer who sets out West armed with only a Bible, tin pot hat, and a bag of seed, but the reality is that John Chapman had an intention beyond merely growing trees. He actually was taking advantage of a deal made to settlers that they could lay claim to land as long as it had at least 50 apple trees on it. Chapman would do the planting, then sell the cultivated land to settlers as they moved west, and displaced indigenous people in the process. Yet, many of us who have grown up seeing the cartoon or hearing other renditions of the legend have never heard of this element of the story of a complicated man. As Howard Means, author of Johnny Appleseed: The Man, The Myth, The American Story says, Chapman has been written as “a children's book simpleton, a frontier bootlegger in the fanciful interpretation of Michael Pollan, patron saint of everything from cannabis to evangelical environmentalism and creation care—everything, that is, but the flesh-and-blood man he really was.”
So the question I’ve been asking myself lately is: Does knowing the history of a food, as dirty as it can get, ruin or improve upon the nostalgia we feel about it? How does knowing the significance behind apple orchards’ histories in this area of the country affect how that sip of apple cider feels going down? I believe that understanding the history of apples gives us an added level of intimacy with a food that for many of us already holds deep-seeded nostalgic significance. As CRAFT works on recipes for an upcoming culinary trail centered on apples, we’ve been curating recipes to highlight the region’s roughly 300-year history with the fruit. I find that it’s important to dwell on our own relationships to the foods we eat as well as its cultural and historical significance. This is why I’ve developed this recipe to go with these reflections. Inspired by a recent episode of another of my favorite nostalgic comfort-TV outlets, the Great British Bake Off, this is a soda bread studded with freeze-dried apples and cheese, which harkens back to my favorite childhood snack. Soda bread is a very approachable quick bread, and the sharp cheddar complements the sweet apple for a satisfying end result. The flavors are quite subtle so this bread can be quite versatile served on its own or accompanying a hearty stew. Serve warm from the oven or toasted with plenty of good Irish butter and spiced apple butter.
Special thanks to Mary Miller, CRAFT’s consulting culinary historian, whose work on these culinary trails was the inspiration for this blog post.
Apple and Cheddar Soda Bread
Time: about an hour
Yield: 8 slices
Ingredients:
1 ¾ cups (225 g) all-purpose flour
Scant 2 cups (225 g)millet flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp sugar
½ tsp salt
6 oz sharp cheddar cheese, grated (I used Cabot’s)
1 oz freeze-dried apple slices (one whole bag from Everyday 365)
12 oz buttermilk
Method:
Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Place parchment paper on a baking tray. Crush freeze-dried apple slices by hand or in a ziploc bag until in pebble-size pieces.
In a large bowl, measure out the dry ingredients and whisk together. Add cheese and freeze-dried apples and mix thoroughly. Make a well in the center of the bowl and pour in the buttermilk. Using a spatula or a clean hand, mix flour mixture into buttermilk starting from the center. Mix until a homogenous mass forms and there are no dry spots remaining, but be careful not to knead the dough.
Turn out dough onto the parchment-lined baking tray. Pat together until it forms a disk about 1 ½ inches tall. Using a knife or a bench scraper, score an “X” across the top. Bake at 425 for 15 minutes, then lower heat to 400 and bake for 25-30 minutes more. Best served warm.